ABSTRACT
Historically, students of memory processing have accepted a broad detenninant of retention: the degree of similarity between the context of learning (memory storage) and the context of the retention test (memory retrieval). In this book, we treat this general detenninant as a principle of memory processing and orient our interpretation of the facts of memory processing around it. The clear intention, though, is to use it-this ancient principle of the importance of stimulus similarity-in the interpretation of memory retrieval, but to apply it only as a pretheoretical conceptual framework, a point of view not yet formalized as theory.
